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Peter is a gay, 67-year-old sex worker – most of the men who come to him are happily married with children. Flynt is a university drop out-turned male escort – one of only about six, by his reckoning, in London. Aspiring actress Beth also chose to work in the sex industry: it meant she could pay off her student debt. However, Dee, a singer who had some chart success in the Nineties, didn’t chose it: she fell into prostitution after becoming addicted to crack cocaine.

This rough-and-ready verbatim show has been devised with 11 sex workers, all of whom appear in it as themselves. The resulting raw, unmediated quality is – perhaps perversely for a piece of theatre – precisely the production’s strength. So it doesn’t matter if Peter, who cuts a flamboyant dash in bright red trousers and matching shoes, has to fumble in his shirt pocket for his lines – we are too caught up in his simple, affecting story of his tragic four year love affair with a woman, Dinah, to care.

See Me Now at the Young VicCredit:
Matt Humphrey

Others are naturally witty performers. Jane, a former crack addict who readily admits she had to “smoke before I blow”, may display all the physical evidence of an exceptionally tough life but her extraordinary inbuilt resilience makes for a dynamite presence on stage.

Still, this is a frustratingly unfocused piece, perhaps almost by definition since it embraces voices and attitudes from across the spectrum. For some, such as the male sex worker Ric London, the transgender woman Pan and the dominatrix Governess Elizabeth, the industry provides freedom and the chance for self expression. For others it’s trap. Beth angrily points out that she picked up a criminal record after a police raid, thus, ironically, making alternative employment impossible. (She also says her 17 hours in jail was far more degrading than any experience in the brothel.)

See Me Now at the Young VicCredit:
Matt Humphrey

For all its deeply powerful candour, however, See Me Now never gets beneath the surface of any single character. There is also the suspicion that the therapeutic benefit to those taking part has sometimes been allowed to take precedence at the expense of the creative results.

Yet there are multiple tantalising stories glimpsed here, be it that of Arthur, a 90-year-old client of Peter who last had sex with a man, on a boat, during the war in 1943, or transgender B’s relationship with her dad, who went with her to Thailand for her boob job. I left thinking that each would make the basis for a fascinating play.